How do you solve cron job planning?

Let’s say every hour I want to clean up some data in the database: split up full names into a first_name, last_name.
For example:

first_name: "John Doe",
last_name: ""

Becomes:

first_name: "John",
last_name: "Doe"

How would you do this in a lean way?
I would need to keep track if a certain name has been ‘cleaned up’.
But I don’t want to just add a name_cleaned_up col to my database, that would get messy quickly with more different clean ups to do.
I think a system (table) that records the clean ups would be better. Where it simply saves “record with id 523 has been cleaned up on 2023-01-01 10:00”.

I have a system like that.

But, I feel like this is a common issue, and I don’t want to re-invent the wheel.
How do you solve this type of issue?